Encyclopedia of

Organized Crime

In the pantheon of the American violent antihero, the gangster has
occupied an enduring price of place second only to the cowboy; both have
enjoyed the distinction of inspiring an entire genre of popular music.
Whether the cinematic iconography is that of the loyal family
operative—
The Godfather
(1972)—or the brutal sadist—
The Untouchables
(1987)—the adventure, violence, and bloodshed of the American
gangster continues to grip the imagination of the world.

In reality, organized crime is mainly another business—the bursts
of machine-gun fire and "rubouts" that dominate the movie
version of gangland are really only the occasional means to a higher (or
lower) end—money. Like rogue nation-states securing their national
interests, organized criminal syndicates aggressively defend their profits
and business "turf" by any means necessary.

In distinction to other forms of criminality, organized crime is a
conspiratorial activity involving the collaboration of numerous people
over a prolonged period. Unlike other criminal groupings, syndicates have
maintained enough organizational strength to allow continued operation in
the face of the loss of one or more members. Criminal syndicates rely on
rules and regulations to maintain
discipline and control within their ranks. Breaking the rules typically
results in verbal or physical punishment, including death.

Organized crime groups are motivated by money rather than
ideology—a characteristic that distinguishes them from organized
terrorism. Although there are occasional links between terrorist groups
and organized criminals (e.g., the Russian Mafia is often accused of
supplying Russian nationalists with weapons), organized criminals
generally avoid connections with terrorists and are much more restrained
and functional in their use of violence.

Like other plunderers, from the state level to the back alleys, organized
criminals are willing to use violence and murder to accomplish their
goals. Although reliable statistics on mob murder and violence are
unavailable, the level of bloodshed seems proportional to the vigor of the
market for mob-supplied goods. Expanding markets and profits associated
often intensify competition between existing groups and spawn new ones;
violence tends to flare when several groups are jockeying for the same
market niche. Violence also plays an important internal role among
criminal groups who use it as a deterrent to insubordination. Violence can
also be the price of failure. Mexican organizations, for example, kidnap,
torture, and execute members whose drug shipments are confiscated by U.S.
border agents.

Gangsters themselves are the most likely victims of
organized-crime-related violence; however, bystanders sometimes get caught
in the middle. The DeMeo crew of the Gambino family murdered well over a
hundred people; while most of them were criminals, several were simply in
the wrong place at the wrong time.

Criminal syndicates tend to specialize in the provision of illicit goods
and services. Organized crime is not limited to any one kind of activity,
illegal or otherwise, but syndicates tend to focus on gambling, drug
trafficking, loan sharking, prostitution, and extortion. To accomplish
their goals, participants function in hierarchical networks, with each
member assigned a particular task. The structure of organized crime
insulates the leadership from direct criminal involvement. The
subordinates are willing employees with specialized skills, such as
computer hacking or contract murders.

Organized criminals often make use of government corruption to accomplish
their organizational goals. Bribery and extortion are necessary tools for
the survival of their enterprise. For example, a recent federal
investigation in Arizona resulted in the arrest of ten federal officers,
two deputy sheriffs, three local police officers, and one local judge. In
another investigation, federal agents discovered that four Immigration and
Naturalization Service inspectors were paid over $800,000 to pass more
than twenty tons of cocaine into the United States.

Traditional Organized Crime

The origins of organized crime in the United States date back to at least
the early 1800s, when criminal gangs victimized the residents of New York,
Boston, and other cities. By the middle of the nineteenth century, at
least some of these gangs had emerged in a sufficiently structured and
prominent form to warrant public recognition of "organized
crime."

One of the first criminal groups with a tightly organized and acknowledged
leadership was New York's Forty Thieves Gang, which thrived from
1820 to about 1860 (another gang by the same name operated between 1930
and 1940). Throughout the early and mid-nineteenth century, many sons of
poor Irish immigrants formed gangs and participated in criminal
activities, including theft, burglary, and extortion. The Forty Thieves
and groups like them were also heavily involved in local politics. In
fact, New York's infamous Tammany Hall politicians used the
brawling Irish gangs as tools of political power, selectively procuring
their services for such unlovely reasons of state as breaking up picket
lines, intimidating voters, and stuffing ballot boxes. In return for their
help, the gangs received protection from the police, access to political
power, and jobs for their relatives.

Other immigrant groups were associated with organized crime in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—among them Jewish, Polish,
Chinese, and Italian—leading many criminologists to suspect that
immigration may have facilitated the growth of organized criminal activity
in the United States. One scholar has argued that because early immigrants
were wedged into poverty-stricken ghettos with few legitimate
opportunities for conventional success, they were more likely to turn to
crime to escape poverty. "The aspiring ethnic,
blocked from legitimate access to wealth and power, is permitted to
produce and provide those illicit goods and services that society publicly
condemns but privately demands" (Ianni 1975, p. 89). In short,
organized crime provided the immigrant and his family a means to escape
the penury and indignity of the ghetto. The same processes may still be at
work in the twenty-first century with more recent immigrants to U.S.
cities.

Like many other immigrants groups, the Irish-American population found
increasingly legitimate avenues for success outside the ghetto. With fewer
members of their own ethnic group willing to support or even tolerate
their criminal ventures, Irish syndicates found it difficult to maintain
control over the criminal rackets. For the most part, the Irish were
slowly, sometimes violently, replaced by other criminal groups.

However, while Irish and other ethnic groups have come and gone on the
American organized crime scene, none have rivaled the impact or resilience
of the Italian-American syndicates. Between 1820 and 1930 almost 5 million
Italians immigrated to the United States—more than 2 million
between 1900 and 1920. Like the Irish before them, Italian immigrants
found themselves isolated in ghetto areas with few legitimate
opportunities to realize the American dream, so that some of their number
sought to escape poverty by supplying the illicit goods and services
demanded by the local populace.

Some argue that the Italian experience was even more conducive to the
formation of criminal syndicates. Because many Italian immigrants did not
speak English, they were even more isolated and had even fewer
opportunities for positive influence outside their ethnic enclaves.
Moreover, the organizational antecedents of organized crime, including
secret societies such as the Italian Mafia and the Camorra already
permeated southern Italian culture. Thus, Italian immigrants brought with
them knowledge of the ways of secret societies and the spirit of the Mafia
that they used to construct a uniquely American organization that emerged
later, with the advent of Prohibition.

In 1919 the passage of the Volstead Act made it illegal to produce,
distribute, or sell alcoholic beverages. Prohibition (1920–1933)
provided the context for the rapid development of a new illegal enterprise
and the necessity for a more complex division of labor between and within
the criminal groups responsible for bringing in and distributing illegal
alcohol. In essence, the large profits that could be made by satisfying
the public demand for alcohol motivated small-time, local Italian gangs to
expand beyond the ghetto.

While it is easy to focus on the violence associated with gang wars during
Prohibition, the breadth of the market induced many Italian gangs to work
more extensively with other criminal groups than they ever had before. At
times, however, cooperation failed and resulted in bloody conflicts. For
example, in Chicago a four-year feud between rival Irish and Italian
forces culminated on February 14, 1929, when members of the Capone mob,
disguised as police officers, systematically executed seven members of the
Moran gang in the aptly named "St. Valentine's Day
Massacre." Interestingly, collaboration with non-Italians increased
profits, and most syndicate leaders recognized that gang wars were bad for
business. Working with non-Italian groups also demonstrated the utility of
other models of organization that departed radically from the family
patronage model of the traditional Italian Mafia that many of the young
American-born Italians rejected.

The violence reached its peak in the Castellammarese War of
1930–1931, when the Old World faction headed by Salvatore Maranzano
was nearly exterminated by younger, Americanized factions under the
direction of Giuseppe Masseria. By the end of the war, Maranzano was dead
along with many of his compatriots, clearing the way for the Americanized
gangsters to assume new levels of leadership in Italian-American crime
syndicates. In the shadow of Prohibition, newer, younger leaders replaced
their fractious elders with an organization that was on the whole more
cooperative, stable, and profitable. Some criminologists contend that by
the end of Prohibition, U.S. organized crime had developed a national,
rigidly hierarchical framework under almost exclusive control of the
Italian Mafia. Others cite evidence that indicates the criminal syndicates
maintained a fluid, decentralized, ethnically diverse structure that has
promoted their interests in an environment hostile to their very
existence. As of the twenty-first century, the Mafia (also known as La
Cosa Nostra) remains the most powerful organized-crime group in the United
States, but most criminologists deem it a declining force.

Nontraditional Organized Crime

The contemporary war on drugs, like Prohibition in an earlier generation,
has drawn the attention of organized crime, generating expanded
opportunities for cooperation and competition among the various criminal
groups seeking entry into this illegal market. While the Mafia may be the
best-established criminal group involved in the American drug trade, many
of the nontraditional groups vying for a share of the action are better
organized, both nationally and internationally, and more violent.
Specialization in drug trafficking is one of the hallmarks of the emerging
criminal syndicates that experts refer to as nontraditional organized
crime; they can also be found operating in other criminal rackets like
gambling and prostitution. Although various Asian gangs, primarily of
Chinese origin, have been active in the United States since the 1850s,
they are also labeled nontraditional organized crime.

The Chinese Triads are among the most feared and interesting criminal
syndicates that operate in the United States. Overseas the Triads are
heavily engaged in illegal gambling, prostitution, and extortion; inside
the United States they generate millions of dollars trafficking in opium
products such as heroin. Like many criminal syndicates, Triads are
principally involved in the importation and wholesale distribution of
narcotics; however, because of their close ties with American Tongs and
Chinese-American youth gangs, Triads have ready access to street-level
markets. Youth gangs are also instrumental in protecting the Triad/Tong
narcotics turf from infiltration by competitors (i.e., rival
African-American groups) through intimidation and violence.

Mexico is also home to a number of powerful organized crime groups.
Mexican cartels, also considered nontraditional organized crime, vividly
illustrate the brutality of drug trafficking. For many years the Juarez
Cartel has controlled the El Paso, Texas, gateway for drug traffic.
Authorities believe that the Juarez Cartel is responsible for more than
300 drug-related disappearances in Mexico, more than 120 drug-related
homicides, and 73 disappearances in El Paso. In a separate incident in
1998, a U.S. border patrol agent confronted and was murdered by narcotics
smugglers along the Arizona-Mexico border. Events such as these along the
U.S. border with Mexico are part of a larger pattern in which organized
criminals attempt to maximize its profits by protecting shipments and
territory through the use of deadly force.

Another nontraditional organized-crime group making headway in the United
States is the Russian Mafia. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
Russian Mafia, or
vorovskoi mir,
emerged as an important criminal organization in both Russia and America,
supplying coveted but illegal goods and services in both markets. In
addition, the Russian Mafia is intimately tied to the political and
economic structure of Russia, much more so than most organized crime
groups. Russian businesses, for example, often have little choice but to
turn to criminal syndicates for investment capital. While many Russian
gangs are local or national, more and more are establishing international
links, including links to the United States, where they are involved in
multiple rackets, including drug trafficking and securities fraud.

Organized Crime and the Media

The mass media both reflect and shape public perceptions of organized
crime. Films such as
Good-fellas
(1990), televisions shows like
The Sopranos
(1999), and books like Mario Puzo's
The Godfather
(1969) all portray Italian-Americans as the primary perpetrators of
organized crime. Furthermore, stories of organized crime in the news often
focus on only the most superficial and sensational crimes. This coverage
leaves the public with the view that this type of criminal behavior, while
somewhat romantic, is excessively violent. In all likelihood, members of
crime syndicates go out of their way to avoid exposure to such violence.
Thus the media has fueled society's appetites for stories about
mobsters while at the same time obscuring the reality of organized crime
groups by providing stereotypical images of their members, their modes of
organization, and their activities. Suffused with the romance of death and
daring in the popular imagination, the bulk of organized-crime activities
carry all the panache of a corporate board meeting or an
accountant's balance sheet.